1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a miniaturized peripheral device detachably connected to the host device and adapted to allow its electronic components to be efficiently cooled. The present invention also relates to an electronic device including a host device and such a peripheral device.
2. Background Art
FIG. 5 is a perspective view of a typical conventional optical transceiver. This conventional optical transceiver has only two interfaces: an electrical connector 31 for exchanging electrical signals with the host device side; and an optical fiber 32 for exchanging optical signals with the line side.
The optical transceiver also includes intense-heat generating components, such as a laser emitting device and a photoreceptor device, and semiconductor devices for data communications, such as a PHY-LSI and a CDR. The amount of heat generated by these semiconductor devices has also increased as their power consumption has increased as a result of enhancing their switching speed to accommodate an increase in the communication speed in recent years. Therefore, the temperature of the optical transceiver must be reduced by external air cooling to ensure stable operation of the device.
To efficiently perform air cooling, it is necessary to tightly join the cooling body and the electronic components to be cooled together and, furthermore, increase the surface area of the cooling body. Therefore, a conventional optical transceiver is constructed such that: air-cooling fins 34 (a cooling body) are provided on the outside surface of an enclosure 33; and the enclosure 33 has protrusions on its inside that are in contact with the electronic components. With this arrangement, a blower mechanism is provided in the host device to efficiently air-cool the enclosure 33 of the optical transceiver.
On the other hand, electronic devices have been proposed which employ a heat pipe to cool its heat generating electronic components (see, e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 63-302584).
However, conventional electronic devices using air-cooling fins and a blower mechanism are high in manufacturing cost and are difficult to miniaturize. Further, in the case of conventional electronic devices using a heat pipe, the optical transceiver is integrated with the host device; that is, the optical transceiver is not detachable from the host device.